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When you use Power Pivot, there are a number of operations requiring more than one click (or much more than just Excel): Creating a pivot table based on the current data model (at least 2 or 3 clicks) Create a table of existing measures (including its Read More...

I and Alberto Ferrari recently completed the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX , and we spent months to correctly describe the internals of evaluation context in this language. There are many details that make data model working with both DAX and Read More...

In one of the Advanced DAX Workshop I taught this year, I had an interesting discussion about how to optimize a SWITCH statement (which could be frequently used checking a slicer, like in the Parameter Table pattern ). Let’s start with the problem. What Read More...

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced Read More...

Calculating the number of new and returning customers is a recurring question. I would say this is a “classical” Business Intelligence problem, very common in marketing department. I worked on these problems with many customers, with small and large datasets, Read More...

Many people requested me how to connect to Power Pivot from an external program, without publishing the workbook on SharePoint or on Analysis Services Tabular. I always said it is not possible (for both technical and licensing reasons), but someone observed Read More...

I had an issue in a query that reminded me a few details naming columns created by ADDCOLUMNS. When you specify a simple name in ADDCOLUMNS, you can use it later, for example in a SUMMARIZE or in a FILTER expression, such as in the following example (see Read More...

The December release of Power Query preview (version 2.9.3502.261) introduced an interesting feature: when you import multiple tables in the data model, relationships existing between tables in the data source are automatically detected and added to the Read More...

I recently wrote an article on SQLBI describing the dynamic calculation of stock inventory in DAX. With this technique, you can avoid creating a snapshot fact table just to store the inventory stock for every day and every product, creating a table that Read More...

This time Microsoft listened to the many complaints received since Excel 2013 release and the stand-alone version of Excel now includes Power Pivot and Power View! This is a very important news because there were customer who didn’t upgrade from Excel Read More...

I'm so happy that DAX Studio finally supports Excel 2013! As Darren Gosbell described in his blog , this release has a few internal changes that will better support future enhancements. I will port the code to capture the query plan for a query in this Read More...

Microsoft released the Workbook Size Optimizer for Excel , the first version of an Excel add-in for Excel 2013 that inspects the data model and suggest possible optimizations. Fundamentally, it tries to apply the best practices descripted in a white paper Read More...

Our new book about PowerPivot 2013 is finally available in printed edition, too! The title is Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot and it is a partial rewriting of the previous book about PowerPivot for Excel 2010 . In the previous Read More...

UPDATE Aug 16, 2013 : Excel 2013 stand-alone now includes Power Pivot and Power View! Rob Collie Ken Puls (thanks Bob!) wrote a very interesting post about the PowerPivot for Excel 2013 licensing . Short recap: PowerPivot for Excel 2013 is only available Read More...

UPDATE Aug 16, 2013: Excel 2013 stand-alone now includes Power Pivot (now the name has a space and it is no longer a single word!). This post was originally published on Feb 18, 2013 and is now outdated. If you already have Excel 2013 stand-alone, you Read More...